


for a moment i was warm

by taizi



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 06:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13229916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taizi/pseuds/taizi
Summary: It’s a cold day in Yatsuhara. Nyanko-sensei scoffs when Natsume says as much.“You’re too human if the weatherstillbothers you.”Natsume frowns. That’s a strange thing to joke about.





	for a moment i was warm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WerewolvesAreReal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WerewolvesAreReal/gifts).



It’s a cold day in Yatsuhara. Nyanko-sensei scoffs when Natsume says as much. 

“You’re too human if the weather  _still_ bothers you.”

Natsume frowns. That’s a strange thing to joke about.

“I didn’t say it bothered me,” he says in token protest. The great yokai flicks a derisive ear and closes his eyes. A moment later, his head moves off the ground and into Natsume’s lap instead.

A heavy weight, but it’s warm. Takashi smiles as he winds his fingers into the thick white fur.

His earliest memory is of this fur; clinging to the beast yokai’s side as it led him through the dark wood, up the mountain, to a large gathering of ayakashi who seemed to be waiting for them both. A scattering of spirits of varying ranks, with nothing in common that Natsume could tell, whose faces lit up when he arrived.

“Don’t be afraid,” one of them said. Clad in a rich purple kimono, extending an elegant hand to him through a curl of cigarette smoke. “Come and drink with us.”

His friends are powerful and protective and always smile when they see him. Sometimes, after too many bottles of wine, their smiles turn sad, and they touch his hair or his face wistfully. But they’ve always been kind to him, and Natsume is fond of each of them in turn.

A crashing through the brush brings his eyes up to the edge of the clearing, where a legless ayakashi with a single round, bright eye is lurching towards them. It draws up short at the sight of Nyanko-sensei’s large, looming figure and wrings its hands.

It isn’t the first time an ayakashi has come to seek Natsume out, though he still doesn’t understand why they do. He feels a longing he doesn’t quite understand to help them, to give them something, but he doesn’t have anything to give.

“What do you want, runt?” Sensei bares his teeth. “You’re ruining our nap.”

“We aren’t napping, sensei,” Natsume says mildly. To the unfamiliar spirit, he adds, “Is there something you need?”

It stares at him, quivering with uncertainty.

“My name,” it begins to say, but then Nyanko-sensei is climbing to his feet with a dangerous gleam in his eyes, and the unfamiliar spirit turns tail and flees.

Natsume watches it go with a pang of sympathy, then turns a narrow-eyed look on his companion as Nyanko-sensei settles back down.

“Don’t encourage them,” Nyanko-sensei says shortly, sounding put-upon. “They’re after something they’ll go great lengths to get their hands on, and you’re just a brat; you’ll get torn apart by them as easily as a spider’s web.”

Natsume leans against him, curious despite himself. “What is it they’re after?”

“A book,” his guardian says with a huff. “A book of contracts. Years ago a human collected all the true names of the yokai she bested, and bound them to a book.”

“Oh,” he says. “What does that have to do with me?”

“You look like her,” sensei says plainly, and turns his head away to sleep.

Natsume stays awake a little while longer, turning those words around in his head. He can’t help the smile that tugs on the corners of his mouth, hiding it behind the press of cold fingers.

He  _looks_ like someone. Natsume wonders what kind of person she was.

The distant buzz of activity pulls Natsume out of his head and directs his eyes to the east. Going still and silent in attention, he can just make out a presence nearby stirring the little low-level spirits into a frenzy. Their voices are too small for Natsume to make out from this far away, but they seem distressed.

Nyanko-sensei tells him not to cater to them, but catering to and caring about aren’t the same thing, in his opinion.

With a sidelong look at Nyanko-sensei, Natsume eases himself upright and takes a few careful steps away. Sensei doesn’t wake up, and Natsume heads into the trees alone.

The closer he gets to wherever he’s going, the more tiny hands and tiny voices reach out to him from the branches of trees and leafy underbrush.

“There are strange humans here,” a spirit the size of a field mouse whispers hotly. “Don’t go this way!”

Humans, this far up the mountain? Strange ones?

Natsume feels more curious than cautious as the trees open up into another bright clearing and the voices of his neighbors fade away. There are two young humans here, grouped like guards next to a strange diagram drawn in the dirt. Maybe the drawing should have been what drew his eyes, but Natsume finds himself drawn to the humans instead.

They’re both pale, maybe paler than they should be, with unhealthy shadows under their eyes and something desperate in the way they’re looking back and forth through the trees. They’re dressed for the weather in jackets and scarves, wound tightly with either cold or anxiety, and seem to be waiting for something, or hoping for something, or both.

Natsume steps out of the forest shadow, watching the humans with interest. Maybe he would have moved closer still, but a little green frog chooses that moment to cross his path with a throaty chirp.

They look at each other for a handful of seconds.

“You look familiar,” Natsume says suspiciously.

Almost instantly, the clearing fills with heavy swirls of dark smoke and a white light that gives him flash-blindness. The trees bend as an immense figure looms overhead, as if summoned there by Natsume’s dubiety.

Scowling, doing the best to blink sunspots out of his eyes, Natsume says loudly, “I don’t need a babysitter, Misuzu.”

“Agree to disagree, Natsume-dono,” the horse-headed yokai refutes in his voice like a force nature. He turns his face to study Natsume with one large eye, mountainous and immovable and somehow, entirely, at Natsume’s beck and call. “Where has that useless bodyguard of yours gone off to?”

“He’s napping,” Natsume says. Feeling a little defensive despite himself, he adds, “Sensei isn’t useless. Where would I be without him?”

“Better off, I’m sure.” Misuzu sounds unbothered. “Just say the word, and I’ll take his place.”

Natsume huffs, and might have said something about how many times he’s heard  _that_ tired offer, but the humans move quickly out of the corner of his eye and distract him. Turning, he finds them clustered a few steps closer together, scanning the clearing with paranoid wariness.

The girl’s eyes pass over them easily, but the boy’s are narrowed, as if he’s trying to focus on something far away and out of focus.

“Something’s here,” he says slowly. “Something – big.”

Natsume’s breath catches.

“He can see you?” he asks. Misuzu snorts.

“Not quite.”

“Um, hello,” the girl says, to what’s nothing but empty air as far as she can tell. Her voice wavers, even as she steels herself to go on, and Natsume feels an ache deep in the middle of everything he is. “If you – if you’re able, could you help us? We’re looking for someone.”

“What are they doing?” Natsume asks of the towering yokai behind him. “It’s dangerous for them to be out here, trying to make contact of whatever spirit happens by.”

“And what does this have to do with you?” Misuzu replies, but there’s no heat in his voice. “Just leave them alone, Natsume-dono. They’ll get discouraged and go home soon enough.”

That’s the safest thing to do. Natsume draws away, but he can’t make himself leave.

There’s a stirring of fondness in his chest that only gets bigger the longer he stands there. It’s the same feeling he gets when the Chuukyuu cajole him into a sip of wine, or when the kappa crawls into his lap with an armful of wriggling fish to share, or when Hinoe lets him in on a playful secret she’s keeping from everyone else. A combination of affection and familiarity that Natsume can’t say he understands, now – not when it’s rearing its head for a couple of humans he doesn’t even know.

Still. He wishes he could be of help to them.

“You won’t say anything?” an unfamiliar voice questions.

It’s not so sudden as to be startling, and he’s confident that nothing harmful could have snuck up on him under Misuzu’s watchful eyes, so Natsume doesn’t react except to look around curiously for the speaker.

It steps forward helpfully into his line of sight. An ayakashi in kimono and haori, with dusty blonde hair hanging to its shoulders. Its mask is horned and one-eyed and painted with a distinct smile. Perfectly silent and still, head turned just enough in his direction that Natsume can tell it’s watching him closely.

“What would I say?” Natsume asks. “Do you know these humans?”

It takes her a moment to answer. Her voice is feminine and deadpan, giving nothing away with her words. “I’ve met the boy.”

“He could see you?” Burning with interest, Natsume adds, “And speak to you?”

“It was only once, under certain conditions,” the ayakashi says. “On an average day, he’s sensitive to my kind, but only enough that he can tell when one of us is near.”

Natsume can’t help but think that would be frustrating. He glances back at the humans, unable to help himself.

While most spirits in this wood are happy to terrorize or torment the local townspeople, his friends aren’t that way. They don’t chase humans through the dark to hurt or scare them, don’t go out of their way to cause trouble. Once he watched Benio turn herself into a delicate butterfly and turn a lost child around, setting them back on the right path home.

Natsume knows it isn’t his place to be proud of them for those gestures of kindness that go against their nature, but he can’t help it. And if anything, they seem to light up when he says as much.

As he watches, the girl’s face begins to crumple in disappointment. The boy rubs his dark eyes roughly, as though they burn.

“We can try again tomorrow,” he says quietly.

“Oh, can you?”

The masked ayakashi turns her head. Natsume looks that way, too, in time to watch a third human join the small party by their drawing in the dirt.

This one is older, disheveled and somehow more tired-looking than the first two. He’s touched by something dark and ugly, a curse that moves across his face in the shape of a little lizard, disappearing under the collar of his jacket, but otherwise nothing about him seems particularly dangerous.

But from the way the kids cow under his glare, he may as well be a dragon.

“I told you to stay away from here,” he tells them sharply, eyes bright behind a pair of glasses. He casts a sharp, distrustful look at Misuzu, and Natsume feels a thrill of a surprise. “This isn’t a game. Until I seal the yokai that attacked him, you  _can’t_ just wander around looking for trouble. And I must have said it a hundred times now –  _that circle is taboo_. I don’t want to catch you using it again.”

“But Natori-san, Ponta said –”

“I don’t care what that thing said, listen to what  _I’m_ saying.” But his ire drains away the longer he looks at the two shamed faces in front of him, and finally he rubs a hand through tousled hair with a sigh. “Just – get your things. Tanuma, is your father home?”

“He’s away for work,” the boy mutters, dispirited as he moves away to pick up a bag. “I’ve been staying with Taki.”

“My parents are away, too,” the girl supplies with a smile that doesn’t sit right on her face. “And it’s been – it’s nice to have him there with me. It’s been hard to sleep. Ever since – “

“I see.” Natori’s voice gentles. “In that case, let me walk the two of you home.”

He says it with another hard look at the horse-headed yokai looming over the rest of them, protective of the children that seem to be in his care as he herds them away, and Natsume says, wondering, “That man can see spirits, can’t he?”

His voice draws everything to a sudden halt.

Unnecessarily, the masked spirit says, “He can hear them, too.”

The man called Natori is looking at him, eyes wide and startled. His hands fall away from Taki and Tanuma’s shoulders, leaving him staring across the clearing at something they can’t see.

Natsume isn’t sure he likes this. Attention is very rarely a good thing. He stoops to pick up Misuzu’s treefrog, taking a wary step backwards toward the trees.

“No!” Natori bursts a few steps forward, stricken. “Please, don’t go. Stay here.”

“He won’t hurt you,” the masked ayakashi says quietly.

“I will crush him if he tries,” Misuzu adds from above. “Let my little one go, Natsume-dono. I’ll have it fetch your wayward guardian.”

Heartened at the idea of Nyanko-sensei coming, Natsume does as he’s told. The frog hops away past his feet, and Natori watches the proceedings with an odd expression on his face. A moment later, he smiles past it. Natsume doesn’t know enough about humans to be sure, but it seems like he’s about to faint.

“I suppose you don’t know who I am?”

Natsume shakes his head no. Something pained happens to the man’s smile, prompting Natsume to supply a rushed, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, no,” the man says wearily. “Please don’t be. Like so much else, this isn’t your fault, Natsume.”

Taki and Tanuma catch their breath so sharply Natsume’s surprised they don’t choke. Taki’s hands fly up to cover her mouth. Both of them look close to tears.

“Natsume’s there?” Tanuma asks hoarsely. “He can hear us?”

Uncomfortably, half-wishing he had something to hold in front of his body like a shield, Natsume says slowly, “I don’t understand. I don’t know who they are, either. I only came because something was scaring the small spirits that live here. I don’t – “

“That’s okay,” Natori says calmly. “Don’t be afraid. There’s a lot here that I don’t understand, either.”

“That’s nothing new, brat.”

 _That_ , finally, is a voice that Natsume knows. He would know Nyanko-sensei’s sleep-scratchy grumbles anywhere, and whirls around to face him. It’s such a relief to reach out and feel that familiar fur under his hands, pressing himself safely into the beastly yokai’s side.

And sensei allows it, because as much as the low-level spirits seem to annoy him universally, he’s never sent Natsume away.

“I can’t believe you would let this happen without  _telling_ me,” Natori says viciously, gesturing widely at the clearing and everyone in it. Nyanko-sensei huffs, his breath ruffling Natsume’s hair. “And what in god’s name are you doing out  _here?_  It would have been much safer for him back in town.”

“He kept wandering off,” sensei says passively. “I decided to take him somewhere I’d have help keeping an eye on him.”

“Are you talking about me?” Natsume asks, frowning. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

“He did tell you,” the masked ayakashi says abruptly, mask angled pointedly in Natori’s direction. “Or, he told Natsume’s friends to tell you. You were more preoccupied with finding the creature that hurt him to listen, and they were too eager to help to wait for you. None of you were wrong. Fighting about it now is a waste of time.”

Natori doesn’t speak for several long seconds, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. His face is weary and angry and hurting, and that aching sympathy in Natsume’s chest stretches to include him.

Finally, the fight goes out of him. He lifts a hand to rub his forehead and says, “So that’s why you just left Taki and Tanuma to their own devices, instead of doing the  _appropriate_ thing and telling me about this mess immediately. You’re getting soft, Hiiragi.”

She doesn’t dignify that with a response.

“Natsume,” he says in a kinder tone. “Would you come over here, please? You can bring that monster of yours with you. I’d like you to step inside this circle, just for a moment.”

“ _Monster_?” Nyanko-sensei snarls. “This splendid form of mine is anything but  _monstrous_!”

And since that was the only issue he had with everything Natori just said, Natsume puts his reservations on a shelf somewhere behind him and approaches the circle drawn in the ground. It’s large enough that he could stand in the center with his arms outstretched without touching the edge on either side.

It seems harmless enough. Misuzu and Nyanko-sensei wouldn’t let him touch it otherwise.

He steps inside.

Nothing happens – he doesn’t feel any different, doesn’t notice any change – and he’s so busy looking down at the diagram around his feet, waiting for something, that by the time he looks up again Taki and Tanuma are already upon him.

They’re crying, pressing close to him, arms wrapped around his waist and shoulders so tightly that it’s a blessing he doesn’t need to breathe.

“Don’t go away again,” Taki sobs, muffled against his shirt. “ _Please_ don’t go away. Stay and let us help you.”

He puts his arms around them gingerly in turn, uncertain what to do and equally as unwilling to hurt them. He was fond of these two humans from the moment he laid eyes on them, for whatever reason, and he doesn’t have the words to deny them.

“Okay,” he says, helplessly, “I’ll stay. I’m here.”

He doesn’t know if it’s the right thing to say, but he thinks it might be. Tanuma buries his face against Natsume’s hair, and Taki leans up to kiss his cheek. Behind them, Natori is talking to Nyanko-sensei in a low voice, while Misuzu listens in ostentatiously. Hiiragi, standing at Natori’s shoulder, looks over as if she can feel Natsume’s eyes.

Her face is hidden behind that mask, but Natsume gets the distinct impression that she’s smiling at him.

It’s a cold day in Yatsuhara. Taki’s hand is warm in his as they walk the long road into town.

The hospital is a quiet place, white walls and tile floors painted gold with the afternoon sun. Tanuma leads the way down a few empty hallways, finally pausing outside an open door. Taki only lets go of Natsume’s hand when they’re inside.

The room is – full. There are books and magazines stacked haphazardly on the table under the window, flowers and handwritten cards and charms crowding the nightstand and windowsill. There are two boys in the chairs on the far side of the hospital bed, brunet and russet heads tilted together where they’ve slumped against each other in their sleep. The mess seems to be mostly theirs.

“They hardly leave,” Taki says with a soft laugh.

Natsume swallows a wave of pain he doesn’t understand and moves past them, taking careful steps toward the bed. There’s a body there, under the soft white sheets. Pale and waifish, with silvery hair and a bruised face.

That’s me, he thinks in a daze. I look like someone again.

He wonders what kind of person he is.

“Whatever attacked you,” Tanuma says behind him, breaking the silence to speak to a person he can’t see, “it – grabbed you, from the top of the stairs, and you fell. The doctors said – they said you must have hit your head pretty hard. It’s the only excuse they could find for why you won’t wake up.”

With a soft thump, and a pattering of paws, Nyanko-sensei hops down from Tanuma’s arms and crosses the room. His lucky cat form is an unfamiliar weight against Natsume’s ankles, but the warmth of him is the same.

“The bastard tried to possess you,” his guardian says gruffly. “My light got rid of it, but not before it knocked you loose.”

Natsume remembers cold mountain air and the pervasive sense that he didn’t belong, walking back and forth looking for home, looking for a hole in the world that was his to slip into and fill.

And he remembers Nyanko-sensei finding him, and herding him bossily up a hill, where smiling spirits waited for him and greeted him by a name that must have been his.

But he doesn’t remember any of what they’re telling him now. He  _wants_ to – he wants to be this person they came looking for, this person they care so much about. He turns their story around and around in his mind, hoping to make sense of it, to adopt it as a sudden truth, to realize or recall a moment lost to him before, but –

His eyes burn, and he swipes at them, frustrated.

“I don’t remember any of it,” Natsume says fiercely, and Nyanko-sensei snorts at him.

“Well, you wouldn’t,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You’re an ikiryō, a living ghost. All your memories and feelings and stupid reckless  _idiot_ thoughts are still here,” he says, with a nod to the sleeping figure on the bed, “with your body, and your brain, and your heart. You’re just – the part of you that’s awake.”

He looks around at the room, full of its good-natured clutter, and the kids asleep by the bed, and the two lingering back by the door. He wants it to be his. But –

“Oh, my,” says a sudden voice at the door, “what a crowd!”

Natsume whirls around, all but tripping over Nyanko-sensei in his haste to see. A woman with smoky brown hair and laugh-lines steps inside, overcoat folded neatly over her arm. Taki and Tanuma move aside to give her room, and Tanuma says, “I’m sorry if we’re in the way, Touko-san.”

“Don’t be silly,” the woman called Touko says with an airy laugh. “It’s nice to have all these visitors.”

She sets her bag and her coat in an empty chair, and casts a fond look at the two boys sleeping on the opposite side of the bed.

Natsume watches with wide eyes as she comes closer, comes right past him, and leans over his likeness in the bed. She adjusts the pillows, and smooths down the blankets, fussing idly as she talks. From beside her, he can see how wan her face is, the tired shadows under her eyes.

“You’ve all been so good to him. I’m sure he’s grateful. When he wakes up, he’ll tell you so.”

When she touches his face, the softest press of her fingers against his forehead, it all but breaks his heart. It’s warm, and it’s home, and it’s his. He doesn’t know anything else, but he knows that. He knows her.

“We’re all missing you dearly, Takashi,” she says gently. “Come back to us soon.”

So he does.

 

* * *

 

 

The doctor finally decides to keep him overnight for observation, but doesn’t see any reason why he can’t go home tomorrow.

Shigeru-san leaves work in the middle of the day, and Natsume has never felt safer than in the moment he can bury his face in his father’s shoulder and let himself be held there. Touko strokes his hair with unending care and says “Welcome back, sleepyhead” so fondly he wants to cry.

None of the hospital staff’s attempts to remove his friends seem to stick, since the room stays full and lively despite the nurses’ best efforts. Taki and Tanuma keep drifting close, as though they have a burning question to ask him, but they never get a private moment to talk.

When visiting hours are over, everyone leaves full of promises to see him first thing in the morning. Nyanko-sensei waits until the room is empty to crawl up from the foot of the bed and make himself comfortable on Natsume’s stomach.

“The Natori brat caught the ayakashi that attacked you and exorcised it,” he says. “His shiki just stopped by to tell me earlier. He tired himself out, because he’s an idiot, but he promised to come see you tomorrow.”

Natsume lifts a hand, stroking fingers through sensei’s soft fur. “I’ll have to thank him for all his help,” he says thoughtfully. Then he can’t help but smile, adding, “Thank you, too, sensei.”

Nyanko-sensei grumbles, kneading the blanket a few times. “You’d be hopeless without me. I’m glad you can admit that.” After a moment, he says, “That brat also wanted me to tell you not to wander off anymore. He said to tell you ‘stick around for awhile.’”

“What does that mean?” Natsume asks, frowning. “I didn’t go anywhere, did I? I’ve been here asleep the whole time.”

The cat is quiet for a long minute, eyes glinting brightly in the dark. Then he huffs, tucking his paws in and settling down for a nap. “No, you didn’t go anywhere. I kept an eye on you.”

Natsume nods drowsily. That makes sense. He knows where he belongs. This place is where his home and his family and his friends are. Where on earth would he have gone from here?

He’s on the cusp of sleep when another thought occurs to him. Pushing himself up on one elbow, Natsume whispers, “Sensei? Where’s the book?”

“Someplace safe,” his guardian says. “Now go to sleep. You’ve been awake for too long.”

**Author's Note:**

> i was @werewolves-are-real's secret santa for the natsume gift exchange on tumblr ! ive never done a secret santa for a fandom before but it was pretty fun :')
> 
> title borrowed from the day i lost my voice by copeland:
> 
>  
> 
> _”for a moment i was warm and the world made sense_  
>  for a moment here this storm had no consequence”


End file.
